Unlock The Full Power Of Basic Selections In Photoshop

Full Power Of Basic Selections: Using "Add To Selection" To Select Eyes

One of the most common questions I get is, "How do I select both eyes at once? I select one with the Lasso tool, but then when I go to select the other one, I lose the selection around the first eye". Let's look at this common problem, and how the "Add To Selection" option can solve it for us. I'll use this photo here:

I'm going to quickly grab my Lasso tool from the Tools palette:

I could also press L on my keyboard to select it.

With the Lasso tool selected, I'm going to draw a selection around the left eye first:

Now with the left eye selected (our left, her right), normally what would happen is that if I tried to select the eye on the right, I'd lose my selection around her left eye. But with the "Add To Selection" option, that's not the case. I'm going to hold down my Shift key once again to quickly access that "Add To Selection" option, which gives me that small plus sign in the bottom right corner of my mouse cursor, and then with my Shift key down, I'm going to select her right eye. Again, I don't need to hold the Shift key down the entire time. Once I've started my selection, I can release it. I'll go ahead now and select her other eye:

And there we go, both eyes are now selected thanks to the "Add To Selection" option.

In the first example where we used "Add To Selection" to select all of the shape, I overlapped the selections to create one main selection. In this example with the eyes, my selections appear to be completely separate from each other, yet Photoshop still treats them as the same selection. I could select her hair, her eyebrows, her lips, and her teeth all separately as well, and as long as I'm using the "Add To Selection" option each time, Photoshop will treat them all as one selection.

So that's our look at the "Add To Selection" option. Now let's look at the "Subtract From Selection" option.